Motion Theory recently opened for business in LA. Founded by Matthew Cullen, its mission is to involve all creative talent attached to a project from concept to completion, and to allow the final product to be molded and morphed by the input from the talent involved. This is unique in that this process usually omits some of the creative parties (i.e. the writers, heh) and solicits involvement primarily from the "highest ranking" creatives on the project. Well, at Motion Theory, if you designed a prop on a stage the show used, they want to hear from you.

Cool enough, in my opinion.

The Motion Theory team's work on the California Gurls music video, for example, yielded 165 shots and was mostly shot against green screen under the direction of Matt Cullen. And everyone pretty much played a part in the look of the show, from Artistic Director Will Cotton on down to the matte painters and compositors who convened in post to get it out the door before the official start of summer. Always a miracle when artists make a date; this case was no different.

Also brought to my attention was Motion Theory's dazzling work on Disney's World of Color show. It seems a participant on AN, Jennifer Hachigian, got an opportunity to work on the piece handling RealFlow duties, really splendid.

In a job that spanned four months (Feb. 2010 thru June 2010), Motion Theory faced one daunting task after another--if the show landed at their house merely six months prior, according to Andy Cochrane they would have had to turn it down or find another house to collab with on it. Turns out, pre-release copies of RealFlow 5 was made available to the Motion Theory team--and that turned out ultimately to be the deal-breaker. Because of access to RealFlow 5 the MTheory crew were able to bring the project in within the time frame window they did. They ended up wrangling 12 TB worth of data for this short and as they approached the conclusion of this project, turned to Houdini PBR for the rendering solution.

Even though I probably would've hauled myself off a cliff in the process, the Motion Theory crew didn't and deserves all the praise the animation community can afford to give them for tackling such a daunting challenge without letting the client see them sweat, and in the time they did. Nothing short of extraordinary.

(And we need to praise them for letting Jennifer Hachigian on their team!)

Thanks to Steve Kaplan for the tip. I never would've thought to write this if it wasn't for his thoughtful reminder.